It’s known worldwide as a day of hearts, Cupids, and flowers—and big business. Each year, 875 million Valentine’s Day cards are bought in the United States, generating more than $925 million in sales. You could almost think the holiday was created to boost sales. But in fact its roots extend back at least to medieval times and perhaps earlier.
Early Christianity supplied the stories that led to the holiday as we now know it. There were a number of Christian martyrs named St. Valentine, but the day most likely gets its name from an obscure Roman priest named Valentinus, who was active in the second half of the third century. According to the legend that spread during the Middle Ages, Valentinus was imprisoned by the Roman emperor Claudius II for giving aid and comfort to persecuted Christians. After renouncing the Roman gods and even attempting to convert the emperor to Christianity, Valentinus was condemned to death—a gruesome death involving beating, stoning, and beheading.
While awaiting his execution—so the story goes—Valentinus struck up a close friendship with the blind daughter of the Emperor’s jailer. As befits a future saint, he miraculously restored the girl’s sight. And on the night before his execution he is said to have written the girl a farewell message “from your Valentine.” He was killed the next day, February 14 by our modern calendar.
As it happened, that was the day of the Roman feast of Lupercalia, a celebration involving the ancient god Faunus. During the feast’s fertility ritual, a priest would daub young men’s foreheads with goat’s blood and milk, after which the men would run off and choose mates in a nearby village. Over the centuries, after Christianity swept Europe, this pagan rite was apparently conflated with the St. Valentine legend, creating a celebration of romantic love.
By the Middle Ages the tradition of exchanging affectionate notes on February 14 had already become common. Geoffrey Chaucer even mentions the holiday in his mid-fourteenth-century poem “The Parlement of Fowles,” as the day when female birds choose their mates. Its popularity continued through the 1600s, despite its celebration being briefly banned by Puritans in England. It was brought to America by English settlers, with the first known observances in the late 1600s. By the middle of the 1700s, handmade cards were becoming more and more elaborate, with decorative heart, angel, and flower motifs and even puzzles and rebuses. By 1850 complex lace-edged valentines were the rage, with several printing companies competing in the ever-more-lucrative cardmaking business. One trailblazing entrepreneur, a Massachusetts woman named Esther Howland, created exquisite valentines that were so popular she was able to build up a business that brought in about $100,000 a year—a huge sum at the time.
The tradition grew again in the United States after World War I, when soldiers returned home to their sweethearts and, equally important, a wartime paper shortage ended. From then until now it has only become stronger. Today it’s one of the busiest times of year for greeting card companies (second only behind Christmas), florists, and chocolatiers. Love does conquer all—at least on February 14.
